Daniel Laurison

I am once again tapping the "support independent, worker-owned, billionaire free news" sign. the most powerful people in the world should not be deciding whether or not we know about this sort of thing. putting Marisa's subscription link below

The Bygone Era of Supreme Court Support for Voting Rights Sixty years after upholding the Voting Rights Act, the Court has dismantled most of it.

Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court first upholding the Voting Rights Act.

We have gotten so, so far away from a Court that cares about democracy.

New from me at @brennancenter.org:

The first edition was great, I used it to teach. Highly recommend.

I accidentally bought three of the first edition because I was so excited about it (then used it to teach a class).

How much new and different in the 2nd edition? I will just get one.

Psyched to be here at Peopling Politics, Bringing the People Back in, a symposium on race, class and inequality in US politics.
Excited to hear some of my longtime intellectual heroes outside of psych like @daniellaurison.bsky.social , @alondra.bsky.social and @povertyscholar.bsky.social

We were promised that the rich were going to leave NYC after Mamdani won and instead we have this...

This was at least 15 years ago.

Other people seemed to be enjoying themselves. I was not but I was trying very hard to be a good sport.

My dancer said no words and gave me no instructions for the entire million years (4ish minutes) of the piece, except to sometimes move me to a different part of the stage. At the end she said thank you and I said sorry.

I was the only audience member on stage for what seemed like eons. My dancing skills are stereotypical awkward nerdy white man skills. I just tried to sort of bounce to the beat as best I could. Eventually the other 10-15 dancers came on stage with their audience members

They have a number where they go into the audience and bring people on to the stage. I did not know this. I was sitting on the aisle. I made eye contact with the first dancer to come off the stage into the audience, she took my hand and took me up to the stage and started dancing.

I danced like I was in that nightmare where you're on a stage and you don't have any idea what you're supposed to do. But I don't have that nightmare anymore.

I have danced on stage with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater company. In front of people. A lot of them.

I am entirely unsure which kind of engineer my maternal grandpa was!

Mom's dad - I believe "engineer" but that's all I've got, he died when she was 15 and I didn't get more info before she got Alzheimer's. Not sure if she HAD more info though, my kids when they were 15 knew I taught college but would have been fuzzy on much more.

Your replies must be very gen-x/our age-ish! Lots of grandpas who were war age during WWII.

Dad's biological dad - all I ever heard was he came back from WWIi an abusive alcoholic, and my grandma kicked him out and was a single mom for 5-6 years.

Dad's stepdad - tugboat captain. He wasn't very nice either but he was gone 2-4 weeks at a time, and my grandma thought that was fine.

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

This is exactly the same kind of general category error that so many Smart Boys seem to make—they may know a lot about one specific thing so it stands to reason that they are capable of understanding anything and everything else in the world with ease

Nice pull and an important reminder that, no, things haven't always been like this.

Yeah, the best time for Congress to act was last week, the second best time was Monday, the "well, it's now or never" time is now.

You had questions about the Take Back our Science rally, and we have answers! We'll keep posting more as they roll in. See you March 7th!
Question: How can i find a rally near me?
Answer: Visit zurl.co/hvoFq and click the "join the fight" button.

There's been a lot of debate within the Democratic establishment about what rhetoric to use via ICE.

Well, an incumbent doesn't lose by 48 percentage points very often—and her vote on collaborating with ICE was the defining issue here.

Wow: In the early vote, it's a blow-out *so far*.

Rodney Sadler, the progessive pastor and activist, leads state Representative Carla Cunningham 75% to 18%.

(Stay tuned as we see how the Election Day vote compares, but that's an ominous start for the incumbent.)

Context:

Yes! I'm sure I've said before how frustrated I was doing my QEs in strat to not have a good, basic sense of just how common or uncommon social mobility IS/was, for just one example. I could tell you that the unidiff coefficient was higher or lower in some places, and even what that meant. But.

WELL, DORKS! @timothysnyder.bsky.social says there is nothing more important than science and no one more important than scientists to establish a decent society and politics...which is why we are STANDING UP FOR SCIENCE on MARCH 7TH across the nation!

JOIN US! www.standupforscience.net/march7

I have to say I'm not at all sad to no longer be editing a journal.

I think it is worth considering, in social sciences, a lot more "research notes" and a lot fewer 8000+ word articles, especially but not only for quantitative work - I felt that way a decade ago but AI makes it more urgent IMO.

This is getting lots of pushback - as intended I'm sure.

Two things I think are ~right:

1) "AI" can do some useful tasks.

2) AI use is going to further screw with an already challenged and not-ideal peer review system, and we should probably rethink the standard research paper model somewhat.

How I see it is AI will exacerbate bad and underdeveloped theory and conclusions, especially of marginalized groups. You can’t AI your way into understanding and properly researching Black politics, for example. What you can do is come up with harebrained ideas and potentially harmful conclusions.

What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.

Screenshot from Swarthmore's web page: Picture of me (middle aged white trans guy, wearing glasses, with a beard, in a blue collared shirt) in front of a bookcase. Text above my picture says "News from Swarthmore" next to my picture it says "Civic Engagement: Tackling the Political Disconnect: How to Engage People Who Feel Shut Out of the Political System"

Swarthmore made my work on the Political Disconnect its lead news story on the home page - http://swarthmore.ed...